


(You Can't Stop) DNA

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: A Little Unsteady [9]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Fluff, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Humor, Hurt Tony Stark, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Interwebs (mentioned), Past Child Abuse, Precious Peter Parker, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, i mean like it's amazing really, so tagging this anyway just in case, still a happy ish ending tho i promise, there's not exactly hurt/comfort in this bc tony doesn't share his thoughts with peter this time, this definitely toes the line between angry parent and abusive parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-12 22:03:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: “Kid.” Tony busies his hands by wiping them down with one of the brown recycled napkins to pat away the phantom stickiness between his fingers. When Peter doesn’t respond immediately, Tony flits the corner of the napkin at his nose. Peter starts.Tony’s mouth twitches involuntarily. “Pete. Look alive for a bit, huh? Why don’t you tell me how your day went?”The boy rubs at the side of his face with a soft fist as if to erase the imaginary drool and embarrassment. “You know how my day went. Pretty much. You were there for the whole man-in-a--”“--In-a-purple-cape-and-an-otter-mask debacle, yeah, I know. I was the one who personally promised to sue Party City for selling those abominations to the public. I was there,” Tony finishes for him wryly. As Peter’s head bobs and dips unnaturally low, Tony flicks at his chin this time with the end of his paper-wrapped straw. “I was talking about before that.”---A night out to Friendly's post-patrol dredges up an unwanted memory of when Howard took little Tony out for ice cream after hitting him. Though Tony Stark today may be a man, that doesn't mean the memory of the rare affection amid the abuse doesn't still confuse him.





	(You Can't Stop) DNA

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This is definitely not the same pile of angst I said I was sitting on last time, but hey, it’s still Iron Dad and it’s still angst. And I’m apparently still not over my addiction to agonizingly long character studies and 4k-word drabbles about 10-minute scenes.
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: [“DNA” by Lisa Marie Johnson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3NNFAuANDo)

Tony has never been to Friendly’s before, but for all the decades he has been conditioned to wine and dine in the finest establishments in Manhattan, it’s saying something that the bright lights and garishly red vinyl seats here strike him as charming. Even the pattern of alternating black and white diamond tiles, together with the faux jukebox in the corner pumping out a lesser-known Michael Jackson number, make for an aesthetic he can get behind.

He was worried initially that the overload of stimuli might push the kid over the edge--Lord knows the exhaustion is already seeping from his bones--but to Tony’s surprise, Peter seems right at home in the sticky seat across from him in the booth. He seems loose, relaxed, about ready to lay his head at any moment in the cradle of his arms on the table.

Tony sniffs and taps the table with a few fingers of his right hand. “Gonna pass out on me already? C’mon, at least give the sugar and grease a fighting chance.” He moves his hand to play with the handles of the wire napkin basket for a minute, then pushes the entire thing to the side so it’s no longer blocking his direct line of vision to the kid.

“Good evening, guys,” a chipper waitress greets them, before Peter has the chance to toss back a retort to Tony. The waitress definitely has a drag to her step and half her hair is bursting out of the bobby pins, but her tired smile is nothing but kind. “Anything to drink while you get started on the menus?”

“Uh, um, I think I already know what I want to order,” Peter stammers. The almost apologetic glance he throws at Tony next is nothing short of baffling to the man. “Mr.--uh, Mr. Stark? I can wait until you’re ready with what you wanna order?”

Tony’s only flicked through one page of the sticky menu. He snaps it shut again and offers a dismissive wave of his hand. “It’s fine, kid. I’ll just have whatever he’s having, ma’am.”

The waitress smiles again, licks the tip of her ballpoint pen and holds it poised over her pad with only a slight tremor to her hand.

“I’ll just take a large fries and a strawberry Fribble, please. And thanks.” Peter tacks on an equally fatigued crease of a smile at the end of his request. The waitress definitely takes note of the effort and flashes her teeth for a second in appreciation of the sentiment.

Tony scrubs the side of his goatee and briefly considers asking her to list the other flavor choices for the milkshake, then realizes that frankly, he doesn’t care. At the very least, it isn’t another Parker abomination. He takes his cue from Peter and nods up at the waitress, hoping the double order is making her life at least marginally better for the night. “As I said, exactly what the kid’s getting. Thank you.”

She finishes scribbling down on her pad and reaches into the pocket of her apron to hand them each a straw. She’s about to turn on her heel and head back into the kitchen, when she seems to stop and realize something. “Sir, since both of your orders are the same, would you still prefer them to be on separate trays, or may I put them all together? All the fries in one basket, for example?”

Tony glances across the table at the kid. He’s already got his cheek mushed against his fist, eyelids drooping. “Sure, whatever’s easier.”

“Sure thing. Coming right up, sir.”

“Kid.” Tony busies his hands by wiping them down with one of the brown recycled napkins to pat away the phantom stickiness between his fingers. When Peter doesn’t respond immediately, Tony flits the corner of the napkin at his nose. Peter starts. 

Tony’s mouth twitches involuntarily. “Pete. Look alive for a bit, huh? Why don’t you tell me how your day went?”

The boy rubs at the side of his face with a soft fist as if to erase the imaginary drool and embarrassment. His lips move a couple of times with no sound coming out as he casts about for his voice. Once he does, it’s scratchy and just a tad high-pitched, and definitely not making Tony struggle to keep a straight face. “You know how my day went. Pretty much. You were there for the whole man-in-a--”

“--In-a-purple-cape-and-an-otter-mask debacle, yeah, I know. I was the one who personally promised to sue Party City for selling those abominations to the public. I was there,” Tony finishes for him wryly. As Peter’s head bobs and dips unnaturally low, Tony flicks at his chin this time with the end of his paper-wrapped straw. “I was talking about before that.”

“Oh. Hngh.” Peter wipes a denim-clad arm across his eyes and the general upper half of his face. The sleeves are far too long on him, even with the cuffs folded up twice in haste. To be honest, Tony had almost forgotten he used to wear that chambray shirt practically everywhere. He was just grateful he’d found it in the trunk of his black Audi when he picked up the kid from the last crime of the night and needed to cover Peter’s flimsy civilian outfit with a little more protection against the unexpectedly biting wind of the July nighttime.

“Today was good,” Peter speaks quietly. “Good--better than most. Well, at the beginning of patrol, I found a little boy and helped him cross the street to his mom on the other side. She hugged me--like--like, actually full-on hugged me, which is a first, I mean, it’s usually the _abuela_ by the bodega who’s giving me hugs if she’s not giving churros, and y’know, it’s not weird ’cause she’s a grandma and all. But people who are closer to my age, or, like, millennials. They usually just ask for a picture or say something awkward and funny and...yeah. It was a nice change that she just hugged me. And it wasn’t weird at all.”

He talks a lot about that, Tony thinks to himself. Physical affection. Especially the different types he encounters at unexpected turns from various strangers on his patrols. Tony wonders idly if Peter even realizes he does that often. And then the next question--the next sensation half of inadequacy and half of unease to follow on its heels: if he makes enough of an affirmation of Peter’s fondness for physical touch, whether verbally or otherwise.

“Two large fries and two strawberry Fribbles!” the waitress chirps, interrupting Tony’s self-destructive internal monologue as she lays the oversized tray between him and the kid. “Let me know if you need anything else. Enjoy!”

Tony’s eyes widen a little. Sure, he had no problem with the fries being piled into one big greasy basket, but he wasn’t expecting for them to pour the entirety of both milkshakes into one family-sized banana split dish.

He steals a glance at Peter as if for confirmation on how to proceed. There’s not even a flicker of astonishment on the kid’s face. Just the ghost of a shrug through his shoulders, and then Peter’s stripping his straw and jamming it into his side of the strawberry monstrosity.

“Oh, God,” Peter moans, jerking backward. He clutches his forehead.

Tony’s heart lurches. “What? _What_? What’s going on, kid? Are you okay?”

“Brain freeze,” the boy gasps out. Tony doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh, weep, or let out a string of colorful words. Preferably all three, and throttle the kid fondly while he’s at it.

“That’s what you get for eating your dessert first,” Tony drawls. He grabs two fries and tosses them into his mouth with a crunch as if to prove his point.

“But it’s gonna melt if I don’t drink it right away.”

“Kid, you fill that mouth of yours faster than a shovel could feed dirt into a grave. I think you’ll polish off your share just fine.”

In response, Peter simply sets to attacking the basket of fries and inhaling them.

The two share a rare moment of pure and comfortable silence, punctuated only by the sounds of Peter’s munching and Tony’s slow slurping through his own straw. Every now and then he rolls the straw between the fingers of his left hand, and his right hand comes up to rub over the back of the other in a complementary rhythm.

When he finally realizes what he’s doing, it’s too late.

In less than a second, Tony is no longer Tony Stark, but little Anthony, feet swinging over the edge of his seat a few inches off the floor and looking everywhere else but his father’s eyes.

At least his nine-year-old self then was spared the discomfort that surely would have ensued had the waitress made the mistake of combining their sundaes into one.

His button-down is done up far too tightly around his neck. It’s the one with the eggplant and silver pinstripes, one of Howard’s favorites on him. It’s a surprise even to himself how he figured that--Howard never verbalized his preference for any particular clothing item on his son. Perhaps even then, young Tony was always perceptive enough to catch the glint of disappointment or begrudging approval in the corner of the man’s eye.

Tony’s breath comes to him a little ragged. His wide eyes are transfixed on the hands before him. Massive, sinewed, dotted here and there with little scars from accidents with electricity that are too faint to be made out unless one knew to look for them. Tony’s always wondered how any hands that interlaced with wild veins could be human. Howard’s left hand is poised loosely at the head of his spoon, rolling the stem around a little between his fingers. His right hand rubs up and down the back of the other in a distracted motion. Almost a rhythm, almost perfection. Younger Tony feels the full brunt of the irony of how the same hands that were just intimidating him and stealing the air from his lungs a few beats ago are now soothing him back into an inexplicable calm.

Surreptitiously, Tony reaches up a hand to undo the top button at his neck. The rubbing of Howard’s hands pauses. Tony dares not raise his eyes to meet his father’s: the action did not go unnoticed.

Howard draws a deep breath. Tony can tell, he can _tell_ , in the way that the day-creased front of his pristine white button-down sucks in against the man’s ribs. Tony’s eyes dart toward the spoon in his own untouched sundae.

Here it comes. _Here it comes_.

Instead, Howard coughs into his fist and mutters: “It’s gonna melt, son. Better eat up.”

Nothing in his short nine years on earth can even begin to form an adequate metaphor to describe the relief that sweeps through him. He’s safe.

He’s safe.

The transgression did not go unnoted, but it slid past unpunished.

“Yes, sir.”

He can feel Howard’s gaze on him. He doesn’t see it--he still refuses to lift his line of vision higher than the third button of his father’s shirt--but all the same, the weight of Howard’s unfathomable eyes boring into him makes Tony prickle enough to want to squirm. Howard puts his hands together again over his spoon in their former position, not rubbing against each other, and even though they are loose and not poised to strike him or shake him, Tony still feels the inexplicable spike punching the back of his throat at the mere knowledge that the hands are ready to resume the soothing rhythm. But they’re not.

“Do you like it?”

Tony nods a tad too vigorously around the searing shock of cold in his mouth. He forces it all down like a man. “It’s--it’s really good, sir.”

A stutter. Another rule broken.

Tony doesn’t know what else to do but to shovel more ice cream into his mouth again. The hands aren’t rubbing. They aren’t fists; they aren’t lax. They aren’t occupied. They are--they are simply there. They are _potential_.

For Tony’s young mind, the epiphany that should only make his chest twinge in slight discomfort is enough to send a blinding mirror of panic behind his eyes. It isn’t truly anxiety--not really--but perhaps her ugly twin. The goddess of anticipation, the one that mocks him with the possibility of fear when he remembers his father’s footsteps along that same specific path of kitchen tile as the man makes his way over to his wife every evening to greet her with a kiss on the cheek.

The thing about anxiety and anticipation, the two best friends that reign inside him, is that he never knows which one will come out.

The thing about Howard’s rules, in the same way, is that Tony never knows which is which. Some days it is a rule--a law--engraved with a calloused and veiny finger in the stone of the countertop. Other days it is a suggestion, a request lacking any tenderness or option. A fickle preference, an invisible laser line Tony has toed so often and failed to duck too many times to forget how it burns.

Howard clears his throat.

Oh, here it comes. _Surely_ , here it comes. Tony would almost rather open his arms in a wide embrace for the anxiety, than muck around in the darkness forever with the anticipation that wears her sister’s mask to string him along.

“That’s good. I’m glad you’re enjoying it, son.”

Tony’s jaw feels boneless. His grip around the handle of his spoon is one of stone.

Do anxiety and anticipation have a triplet? 

Can fear possibly give way to a semblance of hope, a fleeting taste of her, who knows precisely who she is yet refuses to dally here?

It’s a mess. All a mess. Those hands were on his shoulders not two hours ago, corded, bulging with the rage in Howard’s veins, squeezing and shoving till his shoulder blade caught against the corner of the wall behind him and erupted in fire.

_I did my best but it wasn’t enough._

A scoff.

_‘I did my best and it wasn’t good enough.’ What gave you the nerve to think you could say that to my face?_

Tony doesn’t like to look when the hands are on him. He doesn’t like to see the face behind them, see the same pattern of fury etched across the valleys of his father’s brow. He can’t afford to glimpse the wrath there and remember it in anymore vivid detail than the hands already leave him with at night.

_I don’t want you to do your best. I want you to be the best. Until you can come home and show me that’s exactly what you’re doing at school, I don’t want to hear about your fucking best._

Tony grounds himself. At nine years old, he’s just begun to learn it’s a thing he must do on his own: no one else will. 

He is in the fancy hotel café, the one with a French name he genuinely can’t pronounce, three blocks down from their city penthouse. He has his back cradled against the itchy embroidery of a too-fine booth; his spoon is still locked in his right hand, iciness turned to heat in the fervor of his grip. Howard is breathing slowly, evenly, in and out, across him. The man is dipping his spoon into the last few chunks of his sundae and swallowing with the same scientific deliberateness with which he executes everything else in life.

Tony’s here. Howard’s here. Howard is not haranguing him: no, his voice is low, almost...gentle.

“Do you want my extra cherry?”

And Tony can maybe begin to breathe again.

“Okay,” he chokes out.

It’s taken him so long--all of thirty minutes, perhaps, from the beginning of their drive in the sleek copper Benz to this very moment seated behind a potted plant amid the chatter of businessmen winding down for the day--to come to this conclusion: he is at once plagued by terror and ecstasy.

Howard has never taken him out on his own for anything remotely like this. Most definitely not for ice cream. Tony wonders if this will be the first of many to come. 

Little does he know it will be the last.

Yes, the anxiety and anticipation define him. They have defined him for years now: and so the first glimpse of anything akin to happiness cannot approach his horizon without the fear close at its heels.

Still, Tony takes what he can get. He is, after all, a child, and a forgiving one at that. A child who is all too willing to lay the fault on his own bony shoulders if only it will ease the weight of the world’s disapproving glare a little more. And in Tony’s simple, generous mind, he tells himself Howard is saying sorry. 

Howard is trying.

Howard is being a father.

“Mr. Stark?”

Tony sucks in a breath that burns. He chokes. “Yeah. Kid?”

“Are you okay?”

A question he will never get used to, no matter how many times he’s heard it from Peter’s mouth, and Pepper’s, and Rhodey’s, for decades now. A question he never _could_ get used to, because he never heard it in his father’s voice.

“Yeah.” Tony gives a nod so rapid it’s almost a spasm. “’Course I am. Just enjoying watching you transform into a human garbage disposal. Which, by the way, never gets old. Remind me never to take you to Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote. You’d be an absolute disgrace.”

Peter lifts his eyes to meet Tony’s squarely. Tony has to admit even to himself that the directness of the boy’s gaze throws him into an internal jolt. The kid’s brow lifts, and his face morphs into an easy grin at the unmistakable twinkle in Tony’s eye. “Afraid I’m gonna be too charming with my human shovel of a mouth?”

“No, you peasant,” Tony says, quite self-contradictorily. “I pay a tip there generous enough to make even the snobbiest maitre d’hotel shut the hell up. But let’s face it, you’d butcher every goddamn name on the menu and the coat collector would be so scandalized he’d _have_ to kick you out.”

Peter sniffs. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“Would too. Say escargots de Bourgogne.”

“Uh,” Peter splutters, “what even is that?”

Tony waves a hand. “Don’t deflect. It’s on the menu, right there in front of you. You need to ask the waiter what it is, but in order to do that, you need to be able to say it. Can you do that? Escargots de Bourgogne.”

“Oh, come _on_ , Mr. Stark, that’s not fair!”

“What’s not fair? That’s a perfectly common dish to find at a decent joint in Manhattan.” Tony bats his eyelashes innocently.

“At least give me something _easier_. It doesn’t help that I can’t read it it in front of me right now.”

“Okay, what about the name of the restaurant?”

“Which one?”

“The one I just told you about.”

Peter serves him a flat look over his straw. He sucks an extra deep draught of the milkshake. “I have the memory of a dragonfly.”

Tony gasps, holding the last french fry dramatically in limbo over his open mouth. “The hell? Midtown High’s own decathlon champion _doesn’t_ have an eidetic memory?”

“Shut _up_ , Mr. Stark.” For all his grumbling, the kid is quickly sporting a flush from his neck to his cheeks and battling a grin around his straw.

“Okay, okay, okay. Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote. Try it.”

“ _La reloj de Venice lee-apricot_ ,” Peter says with the straightest face imaginable, all circumstances considered.

“You’re dead to me, Parker. Deceased.”

“Eh, considering I’m dating Ned, I’ve definitely heard worse.”

“Heathen.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “Taught you that one.”

“Peasant.”

“ _Old_ and _boring_ , Mr. Stark. Next.”

“Why am _I_ the one under fire here right now? You’re the one who butchered the French.”

Peter flings the paper scraps of his straw wrapper ineffectually at Tony’s face. “I speak Spanish. To me, French is, like, speaking while high _and_ drunk _and_ trying not to cough up phlegm or something.”

“I’m shipping you off to Paris for the rest of the summer so you learn some cultural appreciation,” Tony threatens.

Peter cups his chin in a hand and twirls his straw in the air. “Thanks, Mr. Stark. Can’t resist an offer like that when you’re the one paying.”

“You’re a _nerd_.”

Peter makes a great show of glancing around, pointing to himself with an open-mouthed gasp, and then clutching a hand to his chest. “Mr. _Stark_. You _wound_ me.”

Tony throws back his head in a loud, unabashed and full-bellied laugh. It feels so damn _good_ it hurts.

There the kid sits across from him in some greasy rundown booth, traces of strawberry milkshake dribbling down his chin, his nerdy science pun tee twisted to one side underneath the hideously unbuttoned and rumpled chambray shirt three sizes too big for him. His hair is overgrown and sticking up in curling tufts at odd angles from his head. There’s a tiredness lurking at the corners of his eyes, but it crinkles into a genuine snapshot of mirth, of carefree youth, of an easy and open and _honest_ laugh.

And there Tony sits across from the kid in the middle of goddamn Friendly’s, a place where the names of the menu items are laughable even to a nine-year-old, with a cheap clear plastic straw in his hand as he does war with his kid over the table as if engaged in a battle of lightsabers. The sleeve of his linen blazer is pushed up over his elbow on one arm and wrinkled to the wrist on the other. He’s got his second favorite puppy t-shirt on underneath it, and yes, the fatigue of the worry of more than four decades on earth doesn’t rest easy inside his chest, but his face is lifting in a grin so wide that it hurts his cheeks. He’s almost sure the burst of dizziness behind his eyes is a side effect of laughing so hard and so long like he hasn’t in ages.

And he finds--not without a little sadness for the nine-year-old boy in the French café whose name he can’t pronounce, watching his father’s corded hands and waiting for them to reach forward without making him flinch--that Tony of the present day, Tony the Iron Man, Tony the one with a magnificent kid, can smile unfettered by the anxiety and the anticipation. By the fear of his own hope.

Perhaps, he thinks, it is because he’s already found it.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Somewhere out there in the void, Kirstie is probably muttering _please don’t say this was inspired by real life please don’t say this was inspired by real life please don’t_. Sorry to disappoint, kiddos. This was...yet another personal piece for me. 
> 
> Those of you who’ve been with me since I wrote Time Shifting Weight probably figured out from the hints I dropped that I’m a CSA survivor. The relative who perpetrated it took me out one night for ice cream on the way home from an errand, and it was the first and the last time he ever bought me ice cream, much less sat down with me to eat it. This happened very shortly after he first started abusing me. It was a very strange relationship of power and withholding parental attention so I ended up appreciating that moment as an easy pretense that everything was still normal, that he actually loved me and I had no reason to be afraid. For years after that, after everything came to light and he got kicked out of my life and I started to heal, I always felt super guilty about that memory.
> 
> A couple months ago, I was in a weird headspace and ranted to Bee about how I felt like I couldn’t possibly be a real victim, or how something must be wrong with me, if I still cherished a memory like that ice cream outing and separated it from my overall negative perception of my abuser. She imparted words of wisdom to me that night: that it’s okay to have good memories of people who either abused us or mistreated us. As long as it doesn’t make us justify their behavior, we just accept the fact that that’s how real life works, and that’s how the brain is.
> 
> So, yeah. As long-winded as that explanation above was, this was basically a non-judgmental, painfully honest character study of an abused boy who grew into a man still confused about how to feel about the father who showed him genuine affection one night after treating him like dirt for so many years. (Not that Tony had to deal with CSA, but any child abuse is serious and the emotions just paralleled my experience.) And as Madelynn notes, I like to write dialogue/monologues that don’t have any immediate resolution, so that’s why I chose for Tony not to confide in Peter about what was going through his head while they were at Friendly’s at that very moment.
> 
> As with all other things I write, I’m pretty nervous about putting this out there, but now I submit it to y’all’s judgment and comments. Pls lmk what you honestly thought, if there was a part that could be improved, if you thought it was in our out of character, stuff like that! Any and all comments really boost me like you wouldn’t believe and I save them in my inbox to go over again when I’m having bad days. :) Tysm and ily all! <3
> 
> Oh! And before I forget, in case you didn’t know already, I’ve started two other series, [Angels Among Us](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1122099) and [Nobody Puts Baby on an Alien Spaceship](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1105035). The first one is an exploration of how Peter’s superfamily struggles and triumphs through life together; the second is pure gratuitous Interwebs angst and fluff.
> 
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